The image of me holding myself hostage deep inside my mind popped into my head just now, as I was wondering what to write about, and so here we are.

I’ve envisioned myself as being my own jailor and tormentor a number of times in this space, so on paper^[1] this really isn’t all that different.

And yet, it is. Because it paints a bullseye on the self-victimization of my inner child and how desperate a situation that is.

That poor boy sleeping inside me locked himself in a cage in order to keep the evil real world at bay and retreated into his world of screens and diversions, and at some point along the way he got lost within himself and he’s looked for the way out ever since.

Even though he knows why he’s trapped and knows that he will only find the exit when he stops needing the maze, still, he keeps looking.

I guess it’s better than doing nothing. And he can’t do nothing. He is far too agitated and paranoid and squirrelly for that.

It may not seem like it, but mine is a very restless soul. That’s why I have to fill my mind with distractions that rip my life away.

Video games are perfect for that purpose. They engage me fully because they are an interactive non-stop stream of mental stimulation that keeps me from sitting around actually thinking about my life.

Because my life sucks. So I avoid thinking about it at all costs. Which is why it sucks.

Fixing it would require that commitment to being here and real and taking up space that I was talking about yesterday.

Maybe I need to finally finish being born.

Hold up. my IBS is spazzing out.

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Well that was fun.

Trigger warning, poop talk ahead.

I knew trouble was brewing when a certain deep gurgling, a sound like a chainsaw revving underwater, came up through my guts from below.

Long, hard experience has taught me that this kind of thing and the accompanying sensations can only mean one thing ;

The contents of my lower intestine were liquefying.

And that ain’t good.

Sure enough, before long I had to go poop, and nothing solid came out. That was to be expected, at least if you’re me.

And you might be. I’m a complicated dude.

What I did not expect was for it to burn. That’s not a normal part of this process. And I find myself worrying about what it means.

There’s been no radical shifts in my diet, so that’s off the table. I haven’t suddenly developed a hankering for jalapeno poppers or anything.

That leaves two main avenues of explanation : either something is irritating that general peri-anal region, or something is making that which passes through it irritating.

Amounts to the same thing, I guess.

Something definitely caused everything in my gut to be pulverized like I had a blender in my descending colon.

Presumably, there was a bottleneck somewhere along the line – a place where the intestine narrowed and caused a backlog (sic), and that backlog only cleared when the stomach contents had been reduced to something thin enough to pass through anyhow.

That doesn’t explain the burning, though. My biggest worry, and I have no idea how reasonable this is, is that somehow stomach acid is making it out of the stomach and into my digestive tract where it definitely does not belong.

Makes you wonder how the stomach keeps the acid in but lets food through.

Maybe it doesn’t. I dunno.

More after the break.

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The boy in the bubble

That’s me, I guess.

The difference between me and that famous boy, besides my having a functional immune system, is that his reasons for isolation were very much real.

Mine aren’t. They’re thirty years out of date. And that’s just the issues I have related to bullying and such.

Patient readers know that the real issues started when I was raped as a toddler. That’s when my flight from the unthinkable brutality of it into the depths of my enormous mind and then slammed the door behind me.

And I have been locked in there ever since. And no matter what I try to tell myself, that scared child within me remains convinced that if that door ever opens, the world will come in and destroy him.

And maybe it would, in a way, because if that door opens, he’ll have to wake up.

And grow up, and he – and I – are terrified of that. The healthy side of me wants to grow up and become a real person more than anything else, but the unhealthy side views that prospect with the stark animal terror of a fox beset by dogs.

I tried not to go there with that image but my muse insisted. Damn it.

And that terror harmonizes with the fear from being raped and somehow it all turns into the suffocating casket I live in, the one that is way way too small for me because it was made to fit me when I was much smaller (in all senses of the word) and which has been killing me with how cramped and distorted I have to be to remain inside it.

But it’s my turtle shell. And that makes me cling to it like Linus with his security blanket even though that shell is far too small for me now.

Time to shed that shell and grow another. And that means facing that feeling of unchecked terror and getting on with things despite it.

There will always be a part of me that wants to just keep hiding from the world and being “safe”, and there’s no reason why I have to abandon that completely.

But I need to open up my shell enough to let the air and light in, and let me feel the sunlight on my skin.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.